When a patient arrives at a physician's office, a clinic, an out patient clinic, hospital admissions (e.g., day surgery) or an emergency room, it is standard practice to acquire vital signs data/information representative of the patient's general condition as well as data/information that is used for diagnosis and treatment of the patient. Such vital sign information for a patient includes for example, weight, blood pressure, pulse, O2 saturation, body temperature, and blood sugar/glucose level. In practice, the collection process to acquire such vital sign information particularly in outpatient or physician settings generally involves the use of multiple diagnostic devices to obtain the desired measurements. In addition, it is the usual and customary practice for the measurements or acquired patient vital sign information/data to be manually recorded by the medical personnel and also manual inputting of the information into a patient information database.
The trend of physician practice, particularly in light of recent regulatory changes with regards to the control of the disclosure of patient information including vital sign information, is to promote obtaining such information while maintaining confidentially of the measurements/acquired information. While this practice is being promoted, the typical exam room setting (e.g., in a physician's office), however, is not configured and arranged (e.g., sized) so as to be capable of hosting all of the multiple diagnostic devices.
Consequently and as illustrated in FIG. 1, the present practice is to locate all the different multiple diagnostic devices in a centralized location. This practice can, however, create an environment whereby acquired information could be inadvertent or accidentally disclosed to third parties. In addition, because the centralized location is not the exam room this practice can involve additional walking or movement by the patient which can be problematic particularly when dealing with elderly patients. Also, because these are centralized areas, patients may not be ideally dressed for the particular data or information to be acquired. For example, a patient may be fully clothed so the measured weight includes the weight of clothing and shoes or the blood pressure reading may be affected by the clothing being worn by the patient.
Another practice in use, is to disperse the diagnostic devices such as for example, localizing the scale for weighting the patient in an alcove off or in a hallway, moving other devices about the facility to different exam rooms and/or having the patient go to a dedicated laboratory or testing facility for the acquisition of vital sign data. This practice has the shortcomings as indicated above of requiring the patient to move about the facility or having the medical personnel move the different medical instrumentalities/devices about the facility.
In these cases, it also would be necessary for the medical personnel after they acquired the vital sign information to manually record the vita sign information and also to input this information into a medical database. Such recording and inputting is subject to errors due to incorrect recordal or entry of measurements or incorrect recordal or entry of identifying information (e.g., incorrect entry of barcode) of patient samples that are to be tested and/or used for culturing for diagnostic purposes. Consequently, the increase adoption of electronic medical recording keeping necessarily involves a medical assistant or user to collect and verify all patient vital sign measurement data for submission as collected data to the patient's medical record.
It thus would be desirable to provide a new device, apparatus, system for the collection and storage of vital sign measurements/data and methods for such collection and storage. It would be particularly desirable to provide such a device, apparatus, system and method whereby all diagnostic measuring devices can be arranged so as to be located in an exam room and which would be easily operated by the medical personnel/assistant/user. It also would be particularly desirable to provide such a device, apparatus, system and method whereby the data can be collected, stored locally and associated with a given patient/patient record. The acquired information for the patient also preferably is transmitted or communicated to the facility electronic medical record keeping systems and/or communicated/transmitted to a physician (e.g., an attending physician or physician consultant) that is remote from the facility. It also would be particularly desirable to provide such a device, apparatus, system and method whereby the workflow of the medical personnel for the acquisition of such patient vital sign information/data is streamlined and the time needed for the acquisition of such information/data is reduced in comparison to the time required to acquire data using prior art devices/techniques and thereby also reduce patient encounter time. Such devices, apparatuses and systems preferably would be simple in construction and less costly than prior art devices and such methods would not require highly skilled users to utilize the apparatus.